What I Use Instead of Google

Try https://satellites.pro/plan/world_map# - you can switch between Apple Maps, OSM, Mapbox, Google Maps, Yandex and Esri

This becomes much easier with uMatrix + uBlock Origin extensions for Firefox!

Yeah this is fair! I don't want to give the impression that this is all it takes to get Google to stop stalking you. But I do think it at least helps. I found a lot of the chatter in the de-googling community to a bit purist and defeatist at times, but maybe I went too far the other way, here. I want to encourage people to do the same without thinking it's all hopeless or doesn't make any impact because Google's gonna get you one way or another, but I also don't want to paint an unrealistic picture, as if this is all it takes to wash our hands of Google's reach.

I updated the post to reflect this.

I too actually want to use certain software from Apple, I just refuse to use it on Mac as me and the Mac WM keep talking past each other :-)

After reading up on it, okay, I get that those upstream forwarding resolvers will be faster due to being geographically distributed and having a huge number of users (== very current cache), but man. Seemed to be defeating half the point.

I'm using the supported Unbound config now, but.. still surprised it's not the default.

If apple would have done that (for Maps and other services), how would it be different than Google?

Google offers these services for free to the end-user and generates revenue from ads.

Apple is using these services to sell more hardware devices, and generates revenue from there.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple keep nibbling at Google's software business as it transitions more fully to an added-value services model. Little moves like Apple Music on android, Apple TV+ on Android-based TVs... One could see a similar play occurring with fitness, books, and maybe even maps in the services-centric Apple future.

Limitations

Downloading Images

When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.

The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort Downloading Videos

When videos are downloaded they are downloaded in a really compressed version of the video compared to downloading it via the Google Photos web interface. This is covered by bug #113672044.

Source: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron job. Worth a look.

[0] https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp

[1] https://syncthing.net

[2] https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

You'll get wrecked. But there's good business in it if I'm wrong. So I wish you good luck.

They're likely able to do so because it entrenches their existing profitable businesses. It's unlikely that $12/year per account will be break-even, let alone profitable, as a standalone business.

https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

Of course, at that point you are just trading opt-out Google tracking for opt-in Bing tracking, and that may defeat some of the reasoning behind why you are using VPN for those searches. I find Bing ads and Bing tracking far less problematic and insidious than Google's, so it's an interesting trade off, for sure. One interesting part of the trade off that Google doesn't match (neither opt-out nor opt-in tracking) is "Microsoft Rewards" where Bing gives you a small cut of tracked ad fees in "rewards points" (like credit card/frequent flyer "mileage" programs) that you can redeem for things like gift cards. Sure, it's a cynical loyalty grab, but at least for me it shows that Microsoft still prefers to be a product company at the end of the day and is a little less likely to fall into the evil opt-out only panopticon tracking ad direction that Google has. Obviously other people's opinions vary, and many are loathe to trust Microsoft, but it's an interesting trade-off to be aware of.

I have seen this work more than once.

The main problem seems to be that Google will no longer surface anything that isn't on a major site, so even when you know that the thing you're looking for exists, it can't find it. Obviously this also implies that it's missing a ton of stuff you didn't know existed but would have wanted to see.

Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite (as I mentioned in another comment here). In general searches, DDG and Google return about equally good results, with 10% of the time DDG doing better and 10% of the time Google doing better. With programming-related searches, Google is pretty much guaranteed to return better results for me. Doing the Advent of Code 2020 was the first time in months that I had to consistently do `!g` re-searches, because DDG results were significantly worse.

One of my fears is that as soon as you outsource hardware maintenance, then employees who were good at this sort of thing lose much of their value, either in their own head, or in the group consensus. They start to wander off to work for other companies, and you quickly lose critical mass. Once that happens, the quality of advice you get for architectural proposals degrades, and your number of stupid design mistakes notches up considerably.

These people also provide a lot of your 'informed consumer' qualities. They can explain why you shouldn't have to pay $1000 a month for a service.

I've seen this play out a couple of times. It's too slow to be called a train wreck. It's like watching erosion take out beautiful house. You can enjoy it for a while, but eventually it starts to sag and then fall apart. Slowly at first and then all at once.

It is though. Don't be elitist.

If my ISP wasn’t so aggressive with sending mail, I would’ve just self hosted on my own computer.

However, mailinabox also comes with nextcloud, and it works out of the box with exchange activesync, allowing me to basically mimic gmail’s syncing of calendar/contacts/etc. I made the switch about a year ago, it took registering two domains (one for the actual mail server and one for <lastname>.com) and paying for the VPS, plus all the overhead of initial configuration, but it has been smooth sailing since. My email is happily firstname@lastname.com to the public and private@mailserver.tld for private stuff- it even supports the firstne+string@lastname.com.

At the end of the day, this is probably the best someone can reasonably do. Then it’s just ddg and Apple Maps.

I'm willing to be the other services have similar situations where you might as well just pay someone to do it for you. $160 to not have to maintain a server room seems like a nice deal to me.

Still there's a huge gap between "might do that according to the contract" and "does so on a regular basis and is well known to have no official way to appeal".

Edit: I checked, the OSM wiki actually has a page about it [1]

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple

After doing some basic A/B testing (checking Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps for routing guidance) and establishing that Apple Maps has been giving me earlier arrival times through different routing guidance (and actually delivering on that earlier arrival time, by means of actually using it), I've determined that's less likely to be true, if you're in a city that has been refreshed recently.

Combined with the (potentially anti-competitive) use of private APIs on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, enabling the phone lockscreen to always display routing guidance, and the watch to provide haptic feedback for routing guidance, Apple Maps has become a superior experience as far as driving goes.

This is all if you're already a sucker in their eco-system, and happen to live in a city they care about, which I am.

EDIT: At the same time..

> Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face.

If you're taking this from the perspective of moving from one megacorp to another, rather than quality of service, then yes, there's basically no difference here. Apple today is claiming to care, in a similar manner to Google's old mission statement of "dont be evil". Apple have been pretty clear that their interest in your privacy only extends as far as lip service goes, given the lack of E2E encryption on iCloud storage for the majority of your data.

2 decades ago Google was "don't be evil" and here we are today. Where do we think Apple will be in a decade or two from now?

So yes, in that respect, don't stab yourself in the face, and don't use any megacorp products.

Office 365, which is Microsoft Exchange under the hood?

I wonder if youtube-dl really helps ? It doesn't change the IP, you can refuse/clear cookies in your browser, and for fingerprinting, isn't scraping via youtube-dl make you even more unique among other regular browser users ?

There are actually much cheaper VPS providers than Linode. Check out lowendbox.com for deals. I've had a Linode for years and it's completely underwhelming for the cost. I'd try out multiple different cheaper VPS providers instead, maybe even use multiple for redundancy at the same cost as Linode.

But this is how you try making something new to eventually work, and maybe even become the polished "best available".

I find it extremely hard to be an ethical consumer these days and honestly just get burnt out learning about all the horrible things people and companies with lots of money get away with, so I need to pace myself and take it in manageable doses. I will spend some time learning about Cloudflare this year.

Regarding your counterpoint, I disagree. It's not about ProtonMail claims of encryption or security or anything, it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services and not advertising, and they have no incentive (nor the technical expertise in-house) to read your e-mails for advertising purposes. Furthermore, ProtonMail and all these other services only get a part of your data, so even if they do use your data nefariously, it's better for each one to misuse a separate chunk of it than for one entity to have all of it.

You list a bunch of services Google provide for that $5 and yes, no doubt you can extract good value if you want to use all those things, and also don't mind relinquishing privacy for the content you choose to put on there. FWIW Gsuite is more like $7/m where I am.

For me personally, you can list those bunch of things and gmail is the only really useful, day to day tool - mainly because their spam filtering is better than most. Essentially that's where the only value is, for me.

Also bear in mind Google's history of retiring products, hardly 'iron clad' reliability.

For me, their lack of privacy ethos compounds the problem of them having a monopoly on search, and to a large extent information discovery. That, alongside their huge reach in how they can gather information on people to aid advertising, via Chrome, Android, DNS, analytics... that huge list. Sleep walking into a society where a handful of large corps know everything about you isn't necessary.

And the concept that there is only a single company in the world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.

There are no links to sources, there's no evidence presented, there's nothing to dispute. There's no substance to this comment.

Hacker News has a bias towards Google because Google offers a bunch of services for free that are useful to HN's audience, so HN users would rather not have reasons not to use Google services, which is why comments like this get upvoted, despite their lack of substance.

> Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.

You also don't get any useful customer service for that $5. I know companies that charge less but provide customer service. So what you value isn't what others may value.

At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you can decentralize it. You can give one company your search history and a different company your emails. Even if both companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the two datasets.

> ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general).

Can you back that up with some references? I live in Switzerland and Swiss data protection law is certainly better than American.

- Reader, possibly to make room for Google+

- and then Google+

- etc

You also forgot how they'll ban you from accessing your own paid account, and there won't even be a sham trial or even a kangaroo court, just an automatic death sentence for your data.

Seriously: Google has earned the distrust they are now facing. They have dug this hole

- one shady tactic at a time

- one let down at a time

- one deal with China at a time

- etc

until even former fan boys like me become happy every time I see Google in hot water.

@Googlers: nothing against most of you as individuals. Hope you get well paid and good jobs when Google has to cut. (Except those who think it is OK to use search as a playground for wacky AI experiments, those who implement rules to punish logged in Firefox users with Captchas etc :-)

Customer here. What have I missed?

This is the kind of nonsense comment that ends up being used as the moral justification engineers need to build these privacy invading services.

People are entitled to their own privacy, end of story.